October 2003

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Upcoming Events for Children's Librarians

NEWS AND NOTES

Mark these meeting dates:

Distinguished Round-up: Sunday, February 8, 2004, noon - 4pm at the home of Penny Peck.

Performers' Showcase: Saturday, February 28, 2004, at the San Leandro Public Library.

ACL Meetings, beginning in February: At the Thursday, Feb. 12, 2004 ACL will begin meeting at the Berkeley Public Library, corner of Kittridge and Shattuck. We will meet in Berkeley from February until sometime in the summer, due to construction at the Oakland Main Library, our usual meeting place. Thanks to both libraries for being so generous in hosting our meetings.

Calif. School Library Assn. conference: "Celebrate Books, Literacy & Learning," this year's annual CSLA conference will be held Nov. 12-15 in Ontario, California. Special features include a Legislative luncheon and CYRM dinner, half-day workshops, off-site visits, and various hour sessions. This year's location is very convenient to the Ontario airport.

Celebrate Cricket: San Francisco Public Library is currently hosting an exhibit of artwork from Cricket Magazine until Nov. 8th in the Fisher Children's Center, in celebration of the magazine's 30th anniversary. There will also be a free program on Wed. Nov. 5, 6:30pm in the Koret Auditorium, featuring Cricket's founder and editor-in-chief Marianne Carus in conversation with Walter Mayes and Valerie Lewis, authors of Walter and Valerie's Best

Books for Children.

MacArthur Fellows Sis and Johnson: Two notable people in the children's book world were named MacArthur Fellows last month, an award that is accompanied by a prize of half a million dollars per awardee. Peter Sis, Caldecott Honor illustrator, whose works include Starry Messenger, was named as was author Angela Johnson, who writes poetry and fiction for children and young adults, including Toning the Sweep

William C. Morris, HarperCollins Vice President, Dies at 74.

William C. Morris, Vice President and Director of Library Promotion at HarperCollins Children's Books, died of cancer on September 29, 2003 at his home in Manhattan. He was 74 years old.

During the course of Bill's long and illustrious career in children's books, he was an enormous influence on the relationship between the publishing and library communities. For decades, Bill worked closely and tirelessly with authors, artists, librarians, and teachers to bring books and children together, often in ways that had never been attempted before. He is widely acknowledged and respected throughout the industry as the person who single-handedly revolutionized the way books are presented to librarians and teachers. Bill was also for so many authors, artists, librarians, teachers and editors the epitome of grace and personal commitment to children's books.
Bill was born and raised in Eagle Pass, Texas. He graduated from Rice University and went on to earn a masters degree in American Literature from Duke University. His career in publishing began when he took a job as Christmas help selling books in the Grand Central Station branch of the Doubleday Bookstore in New York City.

In 1955 he was hired by Harper & Brothers to sell both children's and adult books in the New York area. He never left Harper, and over the ensuing 48 years he moved up through the ranks to his final position as Vice President and Director of Library Promotion, and his work focused increasingly on spreading the word about Harper's children's books to librarians and teachers. Over the years, he was instrumental in moving the focus from textbooks to trade books, and he instituted many practices that are today's standards, such as sending review copies to teachers and exhibiting trade titles at institutional shows. His dedication and passion for bringing the publishing and educational community together was personal and pervasive, and over the years the library community recognized him with numerous tributes and awards, including the Association for Library Service to Children Distinguished Service Award. Bill received that honor in 1992, and it is a measure of his standing in that community that he, not a librarian, was the first recipient of this award.

Charlotte Zolotow, who for many years was Publisher of the Children's Division at Harper, once called Bill Morris "the soul of publishing," and cited what many authors, artists, librarians and editors knew first-hand: Bill's determination to read every children's book he could read, list after list, his astounding knowledge of the canon of children's literature, his courageous support of controversial titles, his honest and vocal admiration of the craft of writing, his depth of knowledge of not only books but of the interest and needs of authors and librarians, and his determination to spread the word about their importance to the world. Though the children's book community may have lost Bill Morris, his deep commitment to children's literature, his courageous dedication to the groundbreaking book and the daring author, and his passion for getting every deserving book into the hands of a child will endure.



WILLIAM STEIG DIES AT AGE 95

William Steig, Whose Tough Youths and Jealous Satyrs Scowled in His Cartoons, Dies at 95

William Steig, whose insouciant cartoons of street-tough kids and squiggly drawings of satyrs, damsels, dogs and drunks delighted and challenged readers of The New Yorker for more than six decades, died Friday in Boston. He was 95.

Mr. Steig was also the author of more than 25 children's books, about brave pigs, dogs, donkeys and other creatures. One of the most popular was "Shrek!" which was made into a movie in 2001 and won an Academy Award as the best animated feature film.

The playful, blue-eyed, wire-haired Mr. Steig published his first New Yorker cartoon in 1930. It was a picture of one prison inmate telling another, "My son's incorrigible, I can't do a thing with him." He followed up with more than 1,600 drawings for the magazine and 117 covers, many of which were later published in books of collected drawings….

William Steig was born on Nov. 14, 1907, in Brooklyn, the son of Joseph Steig, a house painter, and Laura Ebel Steig, a seamstress. His parents, Polish-Jewish immigrants, soon moved their family to the Bronx.
He graduated from high school when he was 15, and studied for two years at City College in New York, three years at the National Academy of Design and five days at Yale. He said he was more interested in swimming and playing touch football than in books and admitted that he had "a defective education."

He had ambitions "to be a professional athlete, or to go to sea like Melville." His parents, who were socialists, had ambitions for him, too.

"My parents didn't want their sons to become laborers, because we'd be exploited by businessmen, and they didn't want us to become businessmen, because then we'd exploit the laborers," he recalled. "Since we couldn't afford to study professions, we were encouraged to be artists."

He said that his father could not find a job during the Depression. "My two older brothers were married and my kid brother was a kid. So I became the breadwinner," he wrote. Mr. Steig began to sell his drawings, and they sold quickly. "I earned $4,500 the first year, and it was more than our family, then four of us, needed," he said…
In 1967, Bob Kraus, another New Yorker cartoonist, started an imprint for Harper & Row, called Windmill Books, and he talked Mr. Steig into writing a book for children. In 1968, Steig came up with "CDB!" a book that uses letters to stand for words. CDB!, in other words, is "See the Bee!"

In 1968, Mr. Steig also wrote "Roland the Minstrel Pig," about a pig who plays the lute and sings to entertain other animals but dreams of "days of fame and wealth." When the pig goes off to seek his fortune he runs into Sebastian the fox, who decides to eat Roland. At the last moment, Roland saves himself by singing loudly enough to be heard by the king, the lion, and he is appointed minstrel to the court.

Mr. Steig peopled most of his books with animals because he thought he "could get crazier with animals and have them do stranger things." But the animals occasionally got him into trouble.

In Mr. Steig's 1969 book, "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble," a donkey turns into a stone and his parents go to the police, who are represented as uniformed pigs. Eventually, the donkey parents manage to reconstitute their son. The book was banned in places in 1970 because the International Conference of Police Associations thought Mr. Steig was calling policemen pigs.

Mr. Steig disavowed any political intention. He told Time magazine that he viewed pigs as a good symbol for all mankind - "a creature surrounded with filth and danger, a victim of circumstances created by himself, unwilling and unable to do anything about his condition - and even, perhaps, in a way enjoying it." But the controversy helped book sales….

In the 1970's, Mr. Steig started working with Michael di Capua at Farrar Straus and writing novels for children, among them "Dominic," about a dog; "Abel's Island," about a mouse; and "The Real Thief," about a goose. He continued writing children's books in the 1980's, including "Doctor De Soto," about a dentist treating a fox, "Spinky Sulks" and a sequel to "CDB" titled "CDC?" which even some adults found challenging.

Maurice Sendak once said that Mr. Steig was a natural writer for children: "His use of crazy, complicated language is what's so charming, because kids love the sound of words." When Boris the whale was stranded on the beach, he was described as "breaded with sand." The fox who got his teeth fixed by the mouse dentist, in "Doctor De Soto," thanked him with the words "Frank oo berry mush." Words like lunatic, sinuous, palsied, sequestration, ensconced, rubescent, cloaca and cleave are tossed about casually.

Despite his success as an author, Mr. Steig often complained that he didn't like illustrating because he didn't like drawing the same characters more than once. He said he always drew from memory and worked best when he didn't know what he was going to do.

Mr. Steig's books in the 1990's included "Grown-Ups Get to Do All the Driving," "The Toy Brother," "Zeke Pippin," "Doctor De Soto Goes to Africa," "Spinky Sulks" and "Shrek!" He collaborated with his wife on a number of books, including "Alpha Beta Chowder," "Consider the Lemming" and "The Old Testament Made Easy."
His last book, published in June, was "When Everybody Wore a Hat," about his childhood.

Although Mr. Steig drew almost every day of his life, sometimes he would just color in his old drawings….
Mr. Steig once told Roger Angell, "I've always felt that family was a nuisance" and wished he had been freer. Nonetheless, his books often end with his animal characters returning to their devoted families.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Lucinda, an artist and psychologist, and Jeremy, a jazz flutist, both of New York City; a daughter from his second marriage, Margit (Maggie) Laura, an actress and party planner, of Boston; and two grandchildren..

"I've always despised old people," William Steig once said. "I got angry at my father when he began to show signs of age. I thought, `Oh, come on, cut it out.' "

On another occasion he said: "I think I feel a little differently than other people do. For some reason I've never felt grown up."

Special thanks to HarperCollins for these two articles in tribute to Bill Morris and William Steig.

Nostalgic Re-issues

Little Golden Books: What Baby Boomer didn't have some Little Golden Books in their toy chest? The publisher is still at work, as an offshoot of Random House, although most of their current books are TV or toy spinoffs - Disney stories, books featuring Barbie, etc., and still very reasonably priced at $2.99. But the company has reformatted some of their classic 1950's books, in sturdier bindings and measuring a standard picture book size of 8X10".

These picture books include works from such authors as Margaret Wise Brown and illustrators Garth Williams and Leonard Weisgard. Not all the books hold up; The Great Big Fire Engine Book features only white male firefighters, but for the most part, they are still very appealing. Ruth Krauss' I Can Fly, which features angular cartoon artwork by Mary Blair could have been published today; there is nothing dated about the text or art. A little girl imagines she is a variety of animals, done with a rhyming text: "Swish! I'm a fish."

To find out all the titles available, check out www.littlegoldenbook.com. I was able to review the following four books, and recommend all but the Fire Engine book. Each book is only $8.99, and the bindings are paper over board so they won't last as long as some books, but longer than the regular Little Golden Books:

Brown, Margaret Wise. The Friendly Book, illustrated by Garth Williams, 1954. ISBN 0-307-10643-8.

Gergely, Tibor. The Great Big Fire Engine Book, 1950. ISBN 0-307-10321-8.

Krauss, Ruth. I Can Fly, illustrated by Mary Blair, 1951. ISBN 0-307-10548-2.

Wahl, Jan. The Golden Christmas Tree, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, 1988. ISBN 0-375-82747-1.

Trixie Belden: Growing up, I had heard of but never read Nancy Drew. I didn't know anything about Trixie Belden, by Julie Campbell, until I became a librarian. Apparently, this was another girl who solved mysteries. Unlike Nancy Drew who has always found an audience of young readers, Trixie Belden may not have as wide an audience, unless it is from adults who read them in their youth.

First published in 1948, Trixie Belden is being re-issued with new jacket art by Random House. The inside ink sketches, approximately one per chapter, appears to be the original artwork by Mary Stevens. Just reading the first few chapters of book 1, Trixie seems to be pretty spoiled, not the plucky heroine that Nancy Drew is, and her rich friend Honey seems pretty sappy. But I haven't read others in the series, so maybe those who read them in middle school, the target age range, may have a clearer perspective. To find out when subsequent books will be published, check out www.randomhouse.com/kids. Each is only $6.99 hardback (paper over boards). The first three are out, the fourth is being published this Fall, and the fifth in the series is set for Spring 2004:

The Secret of the Mansion, ISBN 0-375-82412-X.

The Gatehouse Mystery, ISBN 0-375-82579-7.

The Red Trailer Mystery, ISBN 0-375-82411-1.

Penny Peck,
San Leandro Public Library